A Monk's Secret
2009 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Yves Étienne Massicotte
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Trappist monks who began making Oka cheese around 1890 are followed as Brother Albéric continues the tradition at a Manitoba abbey using an eleventh-century recipe kept in a mysterious notebook.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a reverential cheese doc, so Massicotte could've leaned into the monastery-as-sanctuary angle—instead he treats an eleventh-century recipe like an actual mystery object, which is delightfully weird for a film about dairy.
A formally assured meditation on craft transmission: the mysterious notebook becomes a through-line that situates this within a broader conversation about how tradition survives not through nostalgia but through disciplined, repeated hands—it's the kind of layered simplicity that justifies the 27 minutes entirely.
The decision to center an unseen object—that notebook—and let the camera linger on Brother Albéric's hands doing the work rather than explaining it elevates what could've been a museum piece into something tactile and alive.